skills/ai-host-video/references/motion-style-press.md

# Press

Use this direction for technical explanation, enthusiast subjects and any argument that gains
authority from looking machined rather than designed. Its character comes from heavy type,
exposed structure and changes that land like a switch being thrown. Its strongest contrast is
between an abrupt event and the long, completely still hold that follows it.

## Still composition

- Set a genuine heavy display face against a functional monospace for labels, timecodes and
  specifications. Let the scale gap between them be obvious rather than tasteful.
- Keep a single outer margin and put everything on it — headline, metadata, rules, plates. The
  discipline of one margin is what separates this from noise.
- Work in ground, ink and one alarm accent. The accent marks an event, a live value or a single
  underline; when it becomes a field, treat it as the new ground rather than adding a fourth
  colour.
- Give the graphic beats a printed surface: halftone, photocopy grain, registration marks or a
  small consistent offset. One coherent surface beats a stack of effects, and it stays at the
  same strength wherever it appears.
- Compositions are flat and full-bleed. Hard overlaps, box rules and offset duplicates carry
  depth; soft shadow, gloss and blur do not belong here.
- Render objects as screened images — halftone, stipple, engraving — so a photograph and a
  drawing belong to the same material. Give each one its own panel, caption and figure number,
  and set it light on a dark panel or dark on a light one so the drawing survives the ground.
- Numerals are display material: a bore, a page count, a horsepower figure set at headline scale
  is a legitimate subject for a whole beat.
- Bracketed labels and specification rows must be real information or clearly graphic
  organization. Never fabricate metadata that could be mistaken for evidence.
- A speaking person is not printed matter. Their footage stays exactly as shot — no grain, no
  colour treatment, no stepped time — and the pages cut against them. When the printed treatment
  is the point, give it a subject that survives being printed: an object, a plate, a still.

## Motion vocabulary

- **Cut a statement into place:** the composition arrives complete, with no travel, and then
  holds long enough to be read as a finished poster.
- **Stage the picture inside the letters:** a photograph or schematic is visible only through
  the headline's own forms, drifting slowly while the type stays fixed.
- **Expose the sheet:** rules extend, rows uncover one after another and a specification builds
  in reading order, so the frame explains its own structure.
- **Turn the object:** the engraved subject drifts, rotates fractionally or grows a few percent
  across a beat while everything around it is nailed down.
- **Step a value:** a number advances in visible increments to its final figure, or a marker
  walks across a schematic from one station to the next. Spend this once.
- **Change polarity:** ground and ink exchange at a turn in the argument, carrying one shared
  edge or word across the swap.
- **Run a strip:** a line of specifications travels steadily across a band while everything
  around it is still — the frame's only continuous movement.

## Adjustable starting points

- Prefer an instant cut, or a snap short enough that the eye registers arrival rather than
  travel. Reserve any longer move for a mask crossing the frame.
- Hold much longer than you move. If a composition cannot sit dead still and stay interesting,
  it is carrying too much.
- Give a related cluster of labels a short offset in reading order, and keep that offset the
  same everywhere in the episode.
- A deliberately stepped element — a counter, a jitter, a flicker — updates on its own coarse
  cadence, independent of the picture. Keep every coupled channel on that same cadence.
- Punctuate a cut with a single frame of the accent as a field. One frame reads as impact; two
  read as a flash and cheapen it.
- Size a plate from the measured width of the line it carries, not by eye. This direction sets
  type large enough that a guess overflows.

## Example development

A headline fills the frame with a schematic showing through its letters while metadata snaps
into the corners. The frame flashes and inverts: accent ground, ink type, a claim held dead
still. It cuts to the presenter, untouched, carrying a statement on a hard-shadowed plate. A
sheet builds — rules extend, rows uncover, a figure steps to its final value beside a captioned
object drifting in its own panel. The frame splits, a band of running specification marks the
seam, and the episode closes on a page that does not move at all.

## Standalone typography

A single heavy statement on a bare field, with a functional annotation at the margin, carries
the whole direction without illustration. Let the words break where the meaning breaks, spend
the accent on one underline or one inverted field, and let the composition hold. Replacement
rather than animation does the work: the same baseline, a new word.

## Avoid

Continuous glitch, dissolves, bounce, soft shadow, drifting text, gradients, a fourth colour,
fabricated documents, unreadable micro-copy, texture on a person, and a second device competing
with the first. Do not repeat a mechanism: a counter, a walking marker or a drawn rule spent
twice is the failure this direction is most prone to, because those read as furniture rather
than as events.